Reflections: On Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America

How I Found My Story

How can one elucidate the historical meaning of one's own family tragedy? I faced this question throughout the nine years that I worked on my book Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (2009). The book originated in my desire to know more about my father, Mark J. Satter, a Jewish, left-wing attorney who died in 1965. At the time of his death, my father was forty-nine years old. I, the youngest of his five children, was only six. His image in my family was decidedly mixed. While my mother told me that he had been a crusader who fought for the rights of black people, my aunts and uncles undercut her words by confiding that his irresponsible behavior had left our family in dire financial straits. They told me that he had owned properties in what was now a black ghetto neighborhood. He'd hoped the properties would provide for his family, they said. Instead, the properties became worthless. They were sold with the help of a family friend, attorney Irving Block, shortly after my father's death. By then, they were worth so little that the proceeds from their sale hadn't covered the buildings' coal bills.

Fast forward to the summer of 1999. I had just gotten tenure at Rutgers- Newark and decided the time was right to research my father's story. Back in 1965, one of my brothers had saved cartons of papers from my father's law office. In 1999, I read them in their entirety—about 2,000 pages in all. The stories they contained were gripping. They offered a hugely significant challenge to conventional wisdom about what had caused so many black urban neighborhoods to decay into impoverished, crime-ridden slums.

My father, I learned, had represented numerous African American clients who had lost their life savings after purchasing properties "on contract," or on the installment plan. Through his clients, he had learned that white real-estate agents in mid-twentieth-century Chicago were purchasing properties from whites and reselling them—at double to quadruple market value—to African Americans. Since most banks and savings and loans refused to make mortgage loans to black Chicagoans, African Americans were forced instead to purchase properties on contract. Yet doing so was very risky, since, under a contract sale, the buyer forfeits the property if he or she misses even a single payment. White contract sellers would then evict African American home purchasers and resell the property, keeping every penny that the black buyers had invested to date. This was no minor operation. In 1958, my father estimated that 85 percent of the properties sold to Chicago's black population—over 800,000 people—were sold on contract. He wrote that these exploitative sales were draining black Chicagoans of one million dollars a day.

I was shocked by what I read in my father's papers. The story they contained, however, appeared to be unfortunately truncated. As far as I could tell, my father's scathing analysis of the dangers of contract selling died with him in 1965. But after only a few months of digging, I learned everything I needed to tell my story. I tracked down a Chicago activist, Jack Macnamara, who told me that in 1967 he had helped launch a group called the Contract Buyers League (CBL). The group encompassed 2,000 African American families who had purchased homes on contract. They'd picketed contract sellers to demand a renegotiation of their exploitative contracts. When that didn't work, they went on a payment strike. The payment strike led to mass evictions, which they fought in court. They initiated two massive federal lawsuits that challenged a fundamental aspect of the U.S. economy as a whole—namely, the financial systems that left African Americans vulnerable to speculators by allowing the existence of a dual housing market based on race.

What Macnamara described, in short, was the missing second half of the battle against racial real-estate speculation, the...